Sunday, June 29, 2014

Web Development : Publishing (FTP & Testing) - Part 3

Go back to Web Development : Publishing (FTP & Testing) - Part 2

Regardless of which FTP method selected, the steps to transfer the files are pretty much the same. First, connect to the host computer. When you signed up for hosting, the company provided you with login credentials for requirements such as this. Refer to any documentation you received at that time, or access your host company’s website to search for the following three key information: web server address, username, and password. (Check the initial registration email you received, or your host’s control panel.)

 
Above shows what FileZilla looks like when you first open the app. You enter the web server address which is probably something like ftp.sitename.com – your username, and password in the spaces provided along the top. Following authentication the bottom right portion will update to display the host computer’s files and folders. Meanwhile your local files and folders are shown on the left.

If you are connecting to a site you will likely want to connect to again in the future, it’s efficient to set up a saved connection. To do so, choose File > Site Manager and click the New Site button. Then enter the required information in the General tab before clicking the Advanced tab. Here, save yourself some time on subsequent visits by entering in the default local directory, as we did in below.

 
In other words, browse to the location where this site’s files are stored on your local computer and save that location here. This way each time you connect to this site in FileZilla, it will automatically display the related files.

Note that the default remote directory will vary according to your host company’s server setup. You can try /www as we’ve done here, or check with your host company to determine the default folder in which all your
web files should be uploaded.

When you’re connected, transferring files is easily accomplished in one of several ways.
• You can simply double-click the file or folder you wish to transfer.
• You can right-click (Control-click on the Mac) the file and select the option that describes your intended action (i.e., download, add file to queue, create directory, and so on).
• Drag a file or folder from one window to the other.

It’s important to remember that once a file has been transferred to a host company’s computer, it is accessible on the web (provided surfers have the corresponding web address). It’s wise to test your pages thoroughly before publishing them. Likewise, after you make a change to a web page on your local computer, you’ll need to upload (publish) that change to the host company computer before those changes can be visible to web surfers.

Preventing access

Search engines are constantly trolling the web in search of new pages to add to their index. So even if you just uploaded a new page but haven’t given anyone the web address, a search engine can still find and list it.

If you want to prevent a file from being found via search engines, you can add another meta tag to your page’s header element, like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
The name attribute specifies the page’s availability to search engine robots, then adding ‘noindex’ to the content attribute specifies this page should not be added to the index.

Go back to Web Development : Publishing (FTP & Testing) - Part 1

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